Making the grade
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Steffan Paul, a student from Elizabeth Moir School who has been accepted on early decision basis to Harvard University shared his story, and tips for students applying to colleges abroad. Steffan Paul knew what he wanted from the start and didn’t make compromises. “Ever since we began talking about which schools we wanted to attend,” he remembers “Harvard was my choice. I’ve never been there, or to the US but I knew that Harvard was ideal for the kind of person I was and the work I eventually want to do.”
Steffan, 18, is a student of Elizabeth Moir School. He settles easily into our interview after school, even though he has just rushed out after a mock examination to meet us. Born and bred Sri Lankan, he lived in Dubai for a few years, also moving to Indonesia for a couple of years recently. This is his third (and last) year at Moir, where he serves as captain of the school.
He’s somewhat of an all-rounder, focussed on academia but also interested in the creative arts-music, dance and theatre. “Studies have always come easy to me, it’s something that I enjoy,” he says of the excellent grades he has maintained (including 11 A* at his IGCSEs, while at the British International School in Jakarta.). “I think it was mainly because I wasn’t really very good at anything else when I was small! Later I got into dancing and drama and music but studies have always been a strong point.” He enjoys studying history and biology in particular, he says; the latter comes almost naturally to him, and it’s the field he eventually hopes to work in someday. “I also love art subjects and the opportunity to argue and look at things from a logical perspective,” he shares. “I feel that this needs to be more incorporated into biology and the sciences. So you could say that integrating the arts into the sciences is what I’m about.” It’s an interest he developed in Indonesia under his then Biology teacher, and Steffan feels that Harvard will offer him the opportunity to pursue more thoroughly this investigative aspect of science. “I realized that the academic and social structure there was exactly what I wanted from university,” he notes. “Compared with say Stanford or MIT, where its very technology based, this arts-based approach to science is what I’m looking forward to.”
Harvard takes in one Sri Lankan student per year. As the fifth person to be chosen over eight years from Moir, Steffan has already received some mentoring and advice from his seniors. He will study Molecular and Cellular Biology at university, but he’s also looking forward to the school’s arts and drama programme, and being in Boston. Later on, Steffan hopes to work on pathology and virology research on campus, and says he hasn’t quite decided where his academics will take him after that. Steffan’s common application and Harvard application essays were about a passion for playing the piano, and his high school biology teacher ‘Mr.M’. He says there is no particular trick to answering university applications, but it’s a matter of choosing wisely. “The way you answer your question depends on which university you choose. If you choose a university suited to you, they will ask questions that are suited to you and you will most probably answer in the way they expect. So it really is about picking the school that you ideally want to go to.” (DI)